Ailing comic finds laughter a good medicine

Since Monday nights are dead anyway, a standup microphone becomes temporary furniture in a cleared space next to a pool table rendered off-limits by a small tarp reading "Evie's Tavern and Grill."

Maybe a dozen people are gathered in chairs and tables along the periphery, absorbing five-minute sketches from a rotation of amateur comics fishing for laughs.

Open mic emcee Kent Perry flashes a smile that looks more like a wince after a real groaner steps aside, and he mutters, "You never know what you're going to get."

Except that Perry knows exactly what the last guy is all about. The last guy has cancer.

His name is David Abolafia, and he calls himself Pez Man. Pez Man trudges out in a hospital gown, white socks and a black fedora. Pez Man doesn't look sick — he weighs about 260 and has the enthusiasm of a cheerleader.

Pez Man opens with a quick "it takes a village" riff to set up some "YMCA" Village People physical shtick that will pay off later. But first, in the very next instant, Pez Man tells his meager audience why he's wearing the weird threads: In December, he was diagnosed with diffuse large B-cell non-Hodgkins lymphoma Stage III.

Now this is where it gets really tricky, because Abolafia's next setback could be self-inflicted.

Les McCurdy, Sarasota's dean of standup comedy, has seen it all before, the endless parade of hard-luck cases hoping to provoke laughter from loss, diminishment, and all manner of personal mayhem.

"And you better remember you're up there for your audience, not for your own personal catharsis," McCurdy says. "They don't want to be enlightened, they don't want to be inspired — this is not like a theater event.

"They want to laugh their asses off."

So Pez Man has just a few seconds to thaw the chill. He marvels over the absurdity of his predicament. He has become, after all, a human pin cushion enduring medicine-induced erectile dysfunction, new language — "your lymph nodes are chunky" — and a Captain Obvious of a technician who informs him of his low blood count. "No s---!" Pez Man gripes. "Ya took it all!"

Pez Man keeps it moving, doesn't falter, gets a respectable smattering of approval on the slowest night of the week. He leaves the gathered with these words: "Whoever said cancer is not a laughing matter never had cancer or forgot how to laugh."

Or maybe whoever said that was listening to a lousy comic. When it comes to disease and affliction, there are no sacred cows in comedy. At 43, Pez Man — like so many peers — is trying to figure out how far he can press the envelope before it rips.

Birth of Pez Man

Last summer, two-time 2007 "Jeopardy" winner and "Scrabble" aficionado David Abolafia got the performance bug again. He'd never forgotten the rush of the spotlight from his days with an improv troupe, some 15 years earlier, in his native New York. By 2012, he was climbing into the comedy ring.

Abolafia unveiled Pez Man, an alter ego so inept he couldn't — and this is real-life true — figure out out how to work a Pez dispenser. Abolafia dragged Pez Man to clubs from his Sarasota to Ybor City, where he huddled with pros and asked for advice. He was already beginning to think above and beyond his full-time gig as a script writer for a training-video company in Tampa.

Then, late last year, he started getting sick. He thought it was the flu, or maybe diverticulitis. It wouldn't go away. In late December, he got clobbered with the cancer verdict.

Today, on the ground-floor of the Florida Cancer Specialists office in Sarasota, Abolafia has settled in for a six-hour chemo-cocktail drip, which follows the plastic tubing into a port on his chest.

This isn't the first time he's pondered mortality. Nineteen-eighty-eight was a horrible year; Abolafia lost half a dozen friends and relatives within a seven-month span. He was also in Manhattan during 9/11.

"I get it now," says Abolafia. "We're not going to live forever. but life is too short to live in fear. If I can help people come to terms with their own illness, that's what I want to do.

"So I'll be the cancer man."

Growth industry

With some 72 million baby boomers sliding into their mortality years, physical misery and death look to be America's next great growth industry.

For that reason, Palmetto comic Traci "The Princess of Parodies" Kanaan suspects Abolafia is in the right place at the right time.

"David will probably do well if he pursues the cancer survivors idea — he can get that market," Kanaan says.

Touring the country with her keyboards and wit for 10 years, the classically trained musician has been around long enough to know that "stuff that makes you happy isn't funny." The perfect meal, she says, isn't funny. "There's funny in the most horrific."

Having kept a happy face on stage one night "while my mother was on a ventilator and we didn't know if she was going to live or die," Kanaan doesn't have to squint too hard to find levity in personal grief. Her dad was a hot-rod fan, and as the family prepared him for burial, she drew their attention to a missing key ingredient. "There weren't any flames on his casket. He needed flames. They should've been airbrushed, but it was too late for that so we got some magnetic flames to put on it."

Kanaan thinks Abolafia has the sensitivity to make Pez Man work, and she's not alone.

Susan Saiger, who played the dominatrix in the 1982 cult cannibal classic "Eating Raoul," is reflexively wary of those who build routines around a disease that kills more than half a million Americans a year: "I saw a cancer survivor once who did a set at Sidesplitters that just wasn't funny. It was cringeworthy, actually."

Saiger met Abolafia on the Tampa standup circuit last summer — pre-cancer — and liked his poise and persona. After moving back to Los Angeles, she followed Pez Man's latest incarnation online.

"With something like that, there's such a fine line and when David started out, I thought, 'Ohh, dude, I hope you know what you're doing,'" Saiger said. "But David had this sort of calm about him, and he did really, really well. Plus, he's a super-nice guy. It'll be interesting to see how it goes when he comes out on the other side."

Venice resident Lynn Lewis has never met Abolafia but she understands his drive. A longtime motivational speaker who works with First American Title Insurance, Lewis attended McCurdy's Humor Institute years ago, just for the challenge. It would eventually pay off in a way she couldn't anticipate. A decade or so ago, she learned she had breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy that, among other things, required stomach muscle tissue to repair the wound.

Lewis has been doing standup comedy ever since, and cancer figures heavily into the routine. She will tell you, for instance, that she never lost her hair. "I actually kept it in a jar." She will confide how "sometimes when I'm really hungry, my breast will growl." She concedes she can cross the lines of taste and discretion.

"It's your choice, isn't it?" says Lewis, who also speaks at cancer fundraisers. "Bad things are going to happen to you, they just are. But are you willing to go somewhere that hurts and try to make it better? That's a risk."

Walking the line

McCurdy says people who enroll in his humor school are often motivated by reasons above and beyond performance art, such as anger management, or self esteem. "It can be good therapy for some folks, but when a comic walks out on stage and says 'I was abused most of my life and my father just shot himself in the head yesterday,' that's usually not gonna work.

McCurdy has booked plenty of impaired comedians who've managed to strike that rare balance between humor and self-indulgence, such as Josh Blue (cerebral palsy), Darryl Lenox (blindness) and Brett Leake (muscular dystrophy). McCurdy thought Lewis was so successful at walking the line that he invited her to open for Leake who, in 1991, became the first disabled comic to play "The Tonight Show."

Leake's fragile gait is so pronounced, he became famous for directing his audience to it, sort of: "As you may noticed, I have a disability — I have a degree in economics." With 10 family members stricken by the muscular dystrophy, being surrounded by the affliction seemed not only normal, but perhaps it gave him insights into the rewards of self deprecation.

"So much of comedy is tied to the residual differences between us, and things that need to be addressed," Leake says. "The challenge is figuring out how much of that the audience needs to see.

"I think life becomes a little richer when you can make somebody smile, and my disability motivated me to take that risk," Leake says. "Comedy gave me an opportunity to be whole, to take advantage of the resources I do have. And that has helped me to become a better thinker and, hopefully, a more caring person."

Only one regret

David Abolafia has a wife with muscular dystrophy and a 10-year-old son depending on him.

Fortunately, he says as an omnivorous cancer-killer called Rituxan enters his veins and devours blood cells as well, the bad days are few and far between.

But even as he lay hospitalized, amid the tests and the uncertainty, Abolafia was thinking about the future, and not just survival. He was already producing material for the righteous indignation of Pez Man.

"Would it have been different if I had a brain tumor? Certainly," says Abolafia, whose prognosis is for a full recovery. "So I'm lucky. I haven't even lost my appetite.

"Unfortunately, I've known people who have allowed a medical condition to break them and change who they are, and not for the better. That's a shame, because I think we're here to touch as many lives as we can, so that when we die we don't have regrets over the things we didn't do."

At this point, the aspiring comedian voices only one regret. "I had to call and say I can no longer be a blood donor, and I've been a blood donor since college," he says. "That was really disappointing."

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